The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [146]
He laughed, handing her a biscuit filled with ham and Mrs. Bug’s piccalilli.
“How Pizza Came to the Colonies,” he said, and lifted the cider bottle in brief salute. “Folk always wonder where humanity’s great inventions come from; now we know!”
He spoke lightly, but there was an odd tone in his voice, and his glance held hers.
“Maybe we do know,” she said softly, after a moment. “You ever think about it—why? Why we’re here?”
“Of course.” The green of his eyes was darker now, but still clear. “So do you, aye?”
She nodded, and took a bite of biscuit and ham, the piccalilli sweet with onion and pungent in her mouth. Of course they thought of it. She and Roger and her mother. For surely it had meaning, that passage through the stones. It must. And yet . . . her parents seldom spoke of war and battle, but from the little they said—and the much greater quantity she had read—she knew just how random and how pointless such things could sometimes be. Sometimes a shadow rises, and death lies nameless in the dark.
Roger crumbled the last of his bread between his fingers, and tossed the crumbs a few feet away. A chickadee flew down, pecked once, and was joined within seconds by a flock that swooped down out of the trees, vacuuming up the crumbs with chattering efficiency. He stretched, sighing, and lay back on the quilt.
“Well,” he said, “if you ever figure it out, ye’ll be sure to tell me, won’t you?”
Her heartbeat was tingling in her breasts; no longer safely contained behind the rampart of her breastbone, but set loose to crackle through her flesh, small jolts of electricity tweaking her nipples. She didn’t dare to think of Jem; the barest hint of him and her milk would let down in a gush.
Before she could let herself think too much about it, she pulled the hunting shirt over her head.
Roger’s eyes were open, fixed on her, soft and brilliant as the moss beneath the trees. She undid the knot of the linen strip, and felt the cool touch of the wind on her bare breasts. She cupped them in her hands, feeling the heaviness rise, begin to tingle and crest.
“Come here,” she said softly, eyes on his. “Hurry. I need you.”
THEY LAY HALF-CLOTHED and comfortably tangled beneath the tattered quilt, sleepy and sticky with half-dried milk, the heat of their joining still warm around them.
The sun through the empty branches overhead made black ripples behind the lids of her closed eyes, as though she looked down through a dark red sea, wading in the blood-warm water, seeing black volcanic sand change and ripple round her feet.
Was he awake? She didn’t turn her head or open her eyes to see, but tried to send a message to him, a slow, lazy pulse of a heartbeat, a question surging from blood to blood. Are you there? she asked silently. She felt the question move up through her chest and out along her arm; she imagined the pale underside of her arm and the blue vein along it, as though she might see some telltale subterranean flash as the impulse threaded through her blood and down her forearm, reached her palm, her finger, and delivered the faintest throb of its pressure against his skin.
Nothing happened at once. She could hear his breathing, slow and regular, a counterpoint to the sough of breeze through trees and grass, like surf coming in upon a sandy shore.
She imagined herself as a jellyfish, he another. She could see them clearly; two transparent bodies, lucent as the moon, veils pulsing in and out in hypnotic rhythm, borne on the tide toward one another, tendrils trailing, slowly touching . . .
His finger crossed her palm, so lightly it might have been the brush of fin or feather.
I’m here, it said. And you?
Her hand closed over it, and he rolled toward her.
LATE IN THE YEAR as it was, the light died early. It was still a month ’til the winter solstice, but by mid-afternoon, the sun was already brushing the slope of Black Mountain, and their shadows